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THE ATTITUDE OF 
TAMES BUCHANAN 

A CITIZEN 7 OF LANCASTER COUNTY 

TOWARDS 

THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY 
IN THE UNITED STATES 



A Paper Prepared for and Read before the 
Lancaster County (Pa.) Historical Society 



by 



W. U. HENSEL 



May 5, 191 1 



Being One of a Series of Papers on the Subject of Lancaster 
County's Relation to the Slavery Question 



Press of 

The New Era Printing company 

Lancaster Pa 



I 






£* 






,'\ 






The Attitude of James Buchanan (a Cit- 
izen of Lancaster County) towards 
the Institution of Slavery in the 
United States 

BY W. U. HENSEL. 



It is the happy and appropriate 
function of an historical society, with 
even the local limitations of ours, to 
fearlessly explore and faithfully chron- 
icle the events of general interest 
wnich occur within its sphere, to de- 
termine and record the actual facts, 
discriminating the false and true; to 
cherish and perpetuate the traditions 
which hang around men and things, 
even though somewhat nebulous; to 
cultivate and preserve ideals of virtue, 
courage, patriotism and sacrifice; and 
to rightly relate our own local doings, 
in their origin and influence, with 
movements along lines and towards 
ends of State, national and world sig- 
nificance. 

Thus it happens that, while we have 
been considering the various local 
phases under which the questions of 
slavery and abolitionism took concrete 
form in Lancaster county, and are ap- 
proaching a popular celebration whicli 
will commemorate and illustrate this 
mighty issue of American politics in 
the last century, it is fit we view the 
attitude toward this question of the 
two citizens and public officials of 
Lancaster county who, of all in their 
day, reached the highest places and 
wieldest the largest influence in the 
Federal Government. The lives of 
Thaddeus Stevens and James Buchan- 
an, neither native to the county, and 
both becoming illustrious represent- 
atives of it, covered substantially the 
(3) 



(4) 

same period of time. Mr. Buchanan 
came to the county much earlier than 
Mr. Stevens; he had achieved and 
ended his career as a lawyer long be- 
fore Stevens entered upon practice 
here; and, while both were eminently 
successful as lawyers, they seldom en- 
countered each other in politics, and 
were in no sense rivals at the Bar. 
Indeed, Mr. Buchanan's public career 
was practically ended before Mr. Ste- 
vens had ever attained anything like 
leadership of his party or in Congress. 
They were radically different in every 
element of their make-up; and this 
difference was highly accentuated by 
the circumstance that Mr. Buchanan's 
career covered a period when states- 
manship was directed toward a com- 
promise and evasion of the slavery 
question; while Mr. Stevens forged to 
the front when a consideration of the 
issues of abolitionism and universal 
suffrage irresistibly overwhelmed all 
other public questions and submerged 
those who would have obstructed their 
consideration. 

A defter and perhaps more sympa 
thetic hand than mind will sketch for 
you Mr. Stevens' relations to this 
question, which involve far more ro- 
mantic interest than attaches to my 
theme. It must not be overlooked, 
however, that, first of all, Mr. Buchan- 
an was born soon after the organiza- 
tion of the Federal Government, when 
no question of the abstract right of a 
negro slave to be freed was consid- 
ered; when, as Chief Justice Taney 
said, with absolutely judicial accuracy, 
in the famous Dred Scot decision, in 
all the governments of the earth it 
was assumed the negro had no civil 
rights that the white man was bound 
to respect. Mr. Buchanan sprang 
from a race that always respected the 
rights of property, as well as the 
rights of man. He was born of a 



(5) 

household and into a church wheie.n 
liberty is regulated by law, and whose 
children were taught obedience to au- 
thority. His professional allegiance 
to Court and Constitution compelled 
him to measure ethical duties by the 
statutory standard. 

Before he was elected to a seat in 
the House at Washington his constit- 
uents knew his views on the slavery 
question. At a largely-attended and 
enthusiastic meeting of the citizens 
of Lancaster, held in the Court House 
November 27, 1819, at which Hon. 
Walter Franklin presided, a commit- 
tee of three framed the resolutions, 
which were adopted. They protest- 
ed most vigorously against the exist- 
ence of slavery in, or its extension 
into, the territories or new States. 
With James Hopkins and William 
Jenkins on that committee was asso- 
ciated James Buchanan. 

Mr. Buchanan in his long public ca- 
reer more than once admitted that 
he had in later years changed some 
of the political views he entertained 
in his youth. Thus he recanted the 
first part of his memorable 1815 Fourth 
of July speech, which, by the way, had 
disappeared from all records and es- 
caped the most vigorous search; and 
the writer of this paper was fortui- 
tously instrumental in restoring it to 
his now complete works. So, in later 
years, he repudiated his assent to the 
resolutions of the anti-slavery meeting 
of his fellow-townsmen. In a private 
and confidential letter from Wheat- 
land, March 16, 1850, to Jefferson 
Davis — who advised him that Simon 
Cameron had revamped them from an 
old Lancaster newspaper of 1820 — Mr. 
Buchanan rather timidly wrote as fol- 
lows: 

"It may be & doubtless was the 
fact that in 1819 or 1820 my name was 
placed on a committee which re- 



(6) 

ported the resolutions to which that 
scamp General Cameron refers. I was 
then a young man — had a great ven- 
eration for the chairman of the com- 
mittee as my legal preceptor, & prob- 
ably was under the influence of the 
excitement then universal in Pennsyl- 
vania." 

In favoring the Missouri compro- 
mise line, which allowed the people 
only of a new State or Territory south 
of that latitude to establish slavery if 
they saw fit, Mr. Buchanan undoubted- 
ly abandoned the Lancaster resolu- 
tions of 1819. None the less, it is 
manifest he had a conscientious belief 
that this would settle the slavery agi- 
tation and avert disunion. 

His first Congressional declaration 
on the institution of slavery was in 
the course of a speech in the House 
of Representatives April 22, 1826,when 
in discussing the Panama mission, he 
incidentally said: 

"Permit me here, for a moment, to 
speak upon a subject to which I have 
never before adverted upon this floor, 
and to which, I trust, I may never 
again have occasion to advert. I mean 
the subject of slavery. I believe it to 
be a great political and a great moral 
evil. I thank God, my lot has been 
cast in a State where it does not exist. 
But, while I entertain these opinions, 
I know it is an evil at present without 
a remedy. It has been a curse entail- 
ed upon us by that nation which now 
makes it a subject of reproach to our 
institutions. It is, however, one of 
those moral evils from which it is im- 
possible for us to escape without the 
introduction of evils infinitely greater. 
There are portions of this Union in 
which, if you emancipate your slaves, 
they will become masters. There can 
be no middle course. Is there any 
man in this Union who could, for a 
moment, indulge in the horrible idea 



(7) 

of abolishing slavery by the massacre 
of the high-minded and the chivalrous 
race of men in the South? I trust 
there is not one. For my own part I 
would, without hesitation, bundle on 
my knapsack, and march in company 
with my friend from Massachusetts 
(Mr. Everett) in defense of their 
cause. 

"I am willing to consider slavery as 
a question entirely domestie.and leave 
it to those States in which it exists. 
The Constitution of the United States 
will be my rule of conduct upon this 
subject. I have good reason to be- 
lieve that the honest, but mistaken, 
attempts of philanthropists have done 
much injury to the slaves themselves. 
These attempts generally reach the 
ears of the slave, and whilst they in- 
spire him with false hopes of lib- 
erty, and thus make him disobedient, 
and discontented with his condition, 
they compel the master to use more 
severity that would otherwise have 
been necessary." 

If the course of Congressional de- 
bate, of popular discussion on the 
hustings and movements of political 
parties, be fairly traced from thai 
time down to the outbreak of the war, 
it will be found that Mr. Buchanan's 
attitude toward slavery was no more 
friendly than that of the great masses 
of the people of the United States, and 
of practically all its leading parties. 
In pronouncing it "a great political 
and great moral evil," he went about 
as far as was then demanded by its 
fiercest opponent, and in conceding 
that the Constitution regarded it 
as an entirely domestic question, to 
be settled and regulated by the States 
in which it then existed, he took a 
position which no constitutional law- 
yer could deny, and in exact accord 
with what Mr. Lincoln distinctly and 
frequently declared not only before 
but after his election. 



(8) 

Of course, the two great phases of 
the subject which subsequently arose 
to convulse the country, viz., the ex- 
tension of the system into the Terri- 
tories and new States, and the obliga- 
tions of the citizens of free Common- 
wealths to treat fugitive bondsmen as 
chattels, were not then before the 
country for consideration; but it was 
a corollary from the legal status of 
slavery that, if it existed by right, the 
slave was property, and could proper- 
ly be reclaimed like an ox; and that if 
an existing State could settle this 
purely domestic question upon its own 
authority, the people of a newly-or- 
ganizing Commonwealth should be al- 
lowed to do the same. I speak, of 
course, from the viewpoint of the 
lawyer, and not of a humanitarian; 
and I am tracing the history of Mr. 
Buchanan's attitude and not justifying 
it. He was ahead of, rather than be- 
'hind, the average philanthropy of his 
time. 

Strange as it may sound in these 
later days, of entirely too much free- 
dom of speech and licentiousness of 
press, the almost universal sentiment 
North seventy years ago was against 
the circulation through and by the 
United States mails in the slavt 3 
States of publications assailing the 
property rights of the owner in his 
slave and calculated to incite insur- 
rection and destruction. In deprecat- 
ing such irritations Buchanan at least 
reflected the almost universal senti- 
ments of his constituents, his party 
and his section of the country. 

On August 18, 1838, Mr. Buchanan 
addressed a great Democratic mass 
meeting in this city, on the subject of 
"Abolitionism," and in opposition to 
the re-election of Governor Ritnev. 
He deplored the partisan agitation 
of the question largely on the grounds 
that he believed it would postpone 



( 9 ) 

and likely defeat its avowed object. 
He said: 

"The Southern people, before aboli- 
tion commenced, reposing on their 
constitutional rights, had much, very 
much, ameliorated the condition of 
their slaves. Education, and particu- 
larly religious education, was becom- 
ing common amongst them. In sev- 
eral of the States, the question of 
gradual emancipation had come to be 
freely discussed. The question had 
been seriously debated in Maryland, 
Virginia, Kentucky and Missouri; and 
the doctrine had found numerous and 
talented advocates amongst the most 
distinguished men of these States. In 
Virginia the voice of the friends of 
gradual emancipation had been raised 
with power in her legislative halls, and 
had been almost successful. Another 
effort, and this ancient and pow- 
erful Commonwealth might have fol- 
lowed the example of Pennsylvania 
and have become a free State." 

He recurred to this view of the sub- 
ject in an extended letter from Wheat- 
land, November 19, 1850, addressed to 
a public meeting in Philadelphia. Like 
Mr. Webster and Mr. Lincoln, he was 
chiefly solicitous about the preserva- 
tion of the Union, and he deprecated 
abolitionism mainly because that 
threatened it. He prophetically ex- 
claimed: "Heaven forbid that the 
question of slavery should ever prove 
to be the stone thrown into the midst 
of our countrymen to make them 
turn their arms against one another 
and perish in mutual conflict!" His 
denunciation of pernicious agitation 
was far more measured and moderate 
than the utterances from the Bench of 
many Judges in Federal and State 
Courts throughout the North. 

He may have been entirely mis- 
taken in his diagnosis and in his 
remedy, but he was surely sincere in 



(10) 

his desire to relieve the malady. No 
less violent a Whig than Henry Clay 
shared his apprehensions; and Buch- 
anan's apostrophe to the Union was 
an eloquent echo to "Webster's two de- 
cades earlier. Mr. Buchanan closed 
his letter in these words: "But if, in 
:he midst of such a temporary excite- 
ment, the Union should be dissolved, 
the mischief will then be irreparable. 
'Nations unborn, and ages yet behind,' 
will curse the rashness of the deed. 
Should 'the silver cord be loosed, and 
the golden bowl be broken at the 
fountain,' human power will never be 
able to re-unite the scattered frag- 
ments. If the Almighty Ruler of the 
Univ3rse has, in his Providence, des- 
tined the dissolution of the Union, as 
a punishment for the sins of the Na- 
tion, I hope, before that day, I may be 
gathered to my fathers, and never 
witness the sad catastrophe." 

No man who ever tolerated the idea 
of disunion cherished those sentiments 
or wrote these words: "May this 
Union endure forever, the source of 
innumerable blessings to those who 
live under its beneficent sway, and the 
star of hope to millions of down-trod- 
den men throughout the world." 

As Secretary of State under Polk, 
he was unsparing in his efforts to 
break up what he called the "odious 
traffic" of the African slave trade; 
and he brooked no delay in bringing 
offending parties to justice. 

When he favored the annexation of. 
Texas he expressed his hopeful be- 
lief that this new outlet for slave 
labor would convert Maryland, Vir- 
ginia, Kentucky, Missouri, and prob- 
ably others, into free States. The 
time foretold by Mr. Randolph was 
near at hand in those States when "if 
the slave did not run away from his 
master, the master must run away 
from his slave." If five Common- 



(11) 

wealths were created out of the new 
Star of Empire three of them would 
be north of the compromise line 
and would be free. Anticipating the 
admission of California, Secretary of 
State Buchanan foresaw it was bound 
to be a free State. 

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 was 
not, as it is often assumed, a new ag 
gression of the slave power. Since 
1793 there had been a Federal stat- 
ute not only affirming the right of the 
master to follow and reclaim his flee- 
ing bondsmen wherever found, but re- 
quiring the State Courts and legal 
authorities to enforce this right. In 
construing that Act in 1842, in Prigg 
vs. Pennsylvania, 16 Peters, 539, the 
Supreme Court of the United States — 
a Massachusetts Whig, Mr. Justice 
Sftory, delivering the opinion — ex- 
plicitly affirmed this constitutional 
right of the master and clothed him 
with authority in every State of the 
Union to seize and recapture his slave 
wherever he could do it without a 
breach of the peace or any illegal 
violence. But the decision went fur- 
ther and held that State magistrates 
could not be required by Federal law 
to perform any duties involving the 
recapture and return of the escaped 
or escaping human chattel. This de- 
cision — which is quite as monumental 
in the history cf slavery as the more 
famous Dred Scot case — practically 
enabled every State and community 
hostile to slavery to nullify the right 
of the slave owner to his property. 
Henceforth the promise that he should 
be secure in his inalienable owner- 
ship of his own was to be "kept to 
the ear, but broken to the hope." Then 
began the long struggle between the 
humanitarian and the lawyer — and in 
that appeal, first to "the higher law" 
and then to the arbitrament of the 
sword, lies the whole issue which, in 



(12) 

one form or another, has been the 
basis of political differences, social 
agitation, governmental convulsion 
and civil war, ever since society was 
organized into commonwealths. 

To say there is only one side to it, 
or that men of conscience may not. 
varying with their respective view- 
point, fairly espouse one or the other 
cause, is to say that normal vision 
must be near-sighted, cross-eyed or 
one-eyed. The greatest Teacher the 
world has yet seen declared that to 
Caesar must be rendered what is Cae- 
sars, but He expressly reserved to 
the decision of the individual con- 
science the determination of the more 
serious problem of what is Caesars. 

We have seen tnat by training and 
temperament Mr. Buchanan as a law- 
yer was committed to the legal side 
of the proposition; and if as a states- 
man he erred in so choosing, it must 
be admitted that in the day he lived 
and in the light in which he stood 
there were few who had the foresight 
to elect differently. They were at 
best sectionalists, and were neither 
representative men nor were they 
supported by popular sentiment. Least 
of all were the men who were later 
acclaimed the saviours of the Union — 
the Lincolns and Stantons, the Grants 
and Shermans, the Sheridans and 
Meades, the Thomases and Rey- 
noldses, the Butlers and Logans — at 
variance with Mr. Buchanan on this 
question. 

Apart from the consideration that 
no moral question can be permanent- 
ly compromised, and that no nation 
could endure forever "half slave and 
half free," it must be conceded that 
the Clay compromise of 1850 was a 
fair one. The fact that the great 
Senatorial triumvirate — Webster, of 
Massachusetts; Calhoun, of South 
Carolina, and Clay from the South- 



(13) 

west — all strenuously advocated it, at- 
tests that it was a reasonable settle- 
ment. Under it California came in 
free; the domestic slave trade in the 
District of Columbia was abolished; 
the authority of the Federal Govern- 
ment was sufficiently strengthened to 
enforce the Figitive Slave law with- 
out impressing the States into ser- 
vice, and the question of slavery in 
New Mexico and Utah was remanded 
to the exercise of the right of local 
self-government. It is not unreasonable 
to conjecture that had agitation then 
ceased, and had all parties observed 
the "status in quo," slavery would 
have become extinct gradually al- 
most as soon as it was eventually 
abolished, and without the terrible 
tribute of blood, treasure and sacrifice 
which its abolition by war entailed on 
the country — not to count the un- 
speakable cost of sudden suffrage to 
the enfranchised race. 

I cannot find any mention of or > ef- 
erence to the Christiana riot in any of 
Mr. Buchanan's published writings, 
although he must have been at Wheat- 
land during this period. It was be- 
tween his retirement from Polk's Cab- 
inet and his appcintment as Minister 
to England under Pierce; he was not 
then in official l"fe; he was in waiting 
for the Presidential nomination; when 
it went to Pierce he promptly wrote 
the nominee that his own defeat did 
not cost him a pang. 

He was in England from June. 1S53. 
to April. 1856, and in June of the lat- 
ter year he was nominated for the 
Presidency. His utterances in the 
meantime were those of diplomacy 
and his public papers reveal little of 
his attitude toward slavery during 
those exciting days of fierce debace 
that followed the deaths of Clay, Web- 
ster and Calhoun, the decay of the 
Whig party and the assumptions of 



(14) 

Stephen A. Douglas to leadership of 
the Democracy, with his Nebraska 
report and its long train of disturbing 
issues. 

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was early 
recognized by Macaulay as the most 
valuable addition that America had 
made to English literature; it awak- 
ened a popular interest in France, 
more intense than had been excited 
by Dumas' "Three Guardsmen" or 
Eugene Sue's "Mysteries of Paris." 
Naturally, therefore, Mr. Ruchaman 
found it the subject of table talk in 
the British capital; and our Ambas- 
sador never shone mere resplendent 
than in post-prandial discourse. When 
dining at the Duke of Newcastle's, 
our country's institutions were put 
upon the defensive, Mr. Buchanan 
was quick to remind the Chief Justice 
of the Queen's Bench that Lord Holt, 
as Chief Justice of England, had de- 
cided that negro slaves were merchan- 
dise; he secured assurances that Eng- 
land was not encouraging a republic 
of freed blacks in Cuba; he came back 
from England feeling that his public 
life was closing. His ambition to be 
President had ceased. 

Be it noted that the man who was 
most responsible for the virtual re 
peal of the Missouri Compromise and 
for disturbing the truce of 1850, into 
which Clay, Calhoun and Webster — 
West, South and North — had all en 
tered, and who asserted the power of 
Federal Government to enforce the 
right of the people of every new 
State to establish slavery within its 
borders, if they so elected, was 
Stephen A. Douglas. It was he who 
later destroyed the Buchanan-Breck- 
enridge Democracy. It was he who 
held Mr. Lincoln's hat at the inaugu- 
ration of the first Republican Presi- 
dent, and upheld his hands. It was he 
who, while he doomed the Whig party. 



(15) 

organized the movement which kept 
the Democracy of Buchanan out of 
power for twenty-four years — a period 
pregnant with historical importance. 
Mr. Curtis surely does not overstate 
the case when he says that Mr. Buch- 
anan did not approve Douglas' doctrine 
of "popular sovereignty," and that, 
had he been home in 1854, "it would 
have encoun+ered his serious opposi- 
tion." 

It is true that Mr. Buchanan ac- 
cepted the nomination of Presi- 
dent from a united Democratic 
party, upon a platform which declared 
for the right of each State to control 
its own domestic institutions, and 
which deprecated all further agitat- 
tion of the slavery question — thereby 
including an affirmance of the exist- 
ing Fugitive Slave law. But when he 
did so, his views and those of his 
party were firmly crystallized into "the 
law of the land." The Republican 
convention of 1856, which rejected 
Abraham Lincoln as a Vice Presiden- 
tial nominee, made no declaration 
against slavery. It contented itself 
by denying the right of Congress to 
either establish or disestablish slavery 
in the Territories, and asserted the 
right and duty to prevent it — and also 
the "twin relic," polygamy. The issue 
between the parties then was not a 
moral, but a legal one, viz., whether 
the Federal or the local power was to 
be supreme in determining the domes- 
tic institutions of a new common- 
wealth, organized out of territorial 
elements. 

When the Kansas question came on 
for determination, and it was evident 
the majority of the settlers in that 
new State were anti-slavery, the Whig- 
Republicans remorselessly abandoned 
their Federal doctrine and asserted 
themselves in favor of the Democratic 
theory of local self-government. The 



(16) 

impartial student of the history of 
this period will see — as he may see 
again and again in our kaleidoscopic 
politics — that parties can thus sud- 
denly shift their position and carry 
with them the great body of their 
members. 

The storm center of Buchanan's Ad- 
ministration, so far as the slavery 
question was involved, was the con- 
flict in Kansas. In that contest the 
Free Soilers, the Henry Ward Beech- 
er and John Brown Abolitionists, lean- 
ed on the Democratic doctrine of 
home rule and popular sover- 
eignty, and, had the Democratic party 
been true to its own faith, and ac- 
cepted the results of its own teach- 
ings, it would have recognized at the 
outset what it finally realized and 
grudgingly accepted at the outcome, 
viz., that the spontaneous settlement 
of Kansas was anti-slavery, and it 
must come into the Union as a free 
Commonwealth. 

The Buchanan Administration was 
mostly discredited by the turbulent 
proceedings over the declaration and 
determination of what was the actual 
verdict of the people of Kansas on 
the question of slavery under its State 
Government. The attempt of what 
was stigmatized as the "border ruf- 
fian" element to falsify that verdict 
reacted terribly against the political 
fortunes of the Democratic party. The 
outrages committed on both sides dur- 
ing that fierce and bloody contest 
were reprehensible; and it may be 
conceded that the slavery forces were 
by far the more aggressive, insolent 
and unscrupulous. It was a party blun- 
der, amounting to a political crime 
on the part of the Buchanan Admin- 
istration, not to recognize this, or, if 
it recognized it, not to admit it; albeit 
Kansas was finally admitted as a free 
State, President Buchanan signing the 
bill. 



(17) 

None the less, no party to the Kan- 
sas struggle was free from blame. The 
latest and most comprehensive bio- 
grapher of John Brown, of Pottawa- 
tomie — Oswald Garrison Villard, 
grandson of Wm. Lloyd Garrison — 
makes it perfectly clear that Brown 
was a cold-blooded murderer, a re- 
morseless thief, and a cruel guerilla; 
and all apologists of his conduct, 
whether in Kansas or at Harper's 
Ferry, belong to that class of casuists 
who make the end justify the means — 
who would cut a white man's throat 
to set a black man free; or would 
rob the rich to "scatter plenty" to the 
smiling poor. Outlaws have no place 
in organized society. 

The whole Kansas affair was a shin- 
ing illustration of the impossi- 
bility of solving a question whica in- 
volves a great moral issue by run- 
ning an imaginary geographical line 
of compromise through the disputa- 
tion. It ought to be a lesson to those 
who nowadays would settle the liquor 
question by local option policies! 

The other notable incident of the 
Buchanan Administration which was 
most vividly related to the slavery 
question was the notorious "Dred 
Scot decision" of the Supreme Court. 
It was handed down two days after 
Mr. Buchanan's inauguration. No 
Judge participating in it was of his 
appointment; there is no proof what- 
ever of the frequent innuendo that he 
knew of its contents in advance, or 
that their foreshadowings in his mes- 
sage were autho.ritatt.ive. The case 
had been argued and reargued; its 
significance was well understood in 
political circles; its decision was eag- 
erly awaited; and many other saga- 
cious statesmen believed with Mr. 
Buchanan that a final deliverance of 
the Supreme Court on the questions 
involved would be accepted by the 



(18) 

country-at-large as a settlement of 
them. 

Their miscalculation was, at least, 
no greater than that of Mr. Lincola 
and his advisers, who, four years 
later, cherished the delusion that war 
could be averted; and who, even six 
years later, practically offered the 
States in rebellion a continuance of 
slavery if they would return to the 
Union. 

When Mr. Lincoln wrote to Horace 
Greeley that he would gladly spare sla- 
very if thereby he could save the 
Union, he evinced the same spirit that 
Mr. Buchanan had repeatedly express- 
ed when he deprecated abolitionism 
mainly because it threatened the in- 
tegrity of the nation. Personally he 
had mo more love for the institution 
when he quit public life, in 1861, than 
when in Lancaster, in 1819. he had 
declared against its extension. Indi- 
vidually he frequently purchased the 
freedom of slaves in Washington, 
brought them with him to Pennsyl- 
vania, leaving it to them to repay him, 
if they could, out of their wages. 

There is a homely saying that hind- 
sight is easier than foresight. 

Few statesmen and fewer politi- 
cians are like Wordsworth's "Happy 
Warrior," who 

"Through the heat of conflict keeps 

the law 
In calmness made and sees what he 

foresaw." 

It is a widespread popular delusion 
that Abraham Lincoln was the nom- 
inee of an anti-slavery party and was 
chosen a candidate and elected in 
1860 on a platform pledging, if not 
abolitionism, at least some modifica- 
tion of slavery in the Southern 
States. Nothing could be further from 
the truth. Neither he nor the platform 
of his party assailed the morality of 



(19) 

slavery itself or the legality of the in- 
stitution in the States where it ex- 
isted. His nomination was the defeat 
of the radical wing of his party; it 
was a condemnation of Seward's doc- 
trine of the higher law. In the open- 
ing speech of his famous Senatorial 
campaign Mr. Lincoln had intimated 
his entire willingness to let slavery 
where and as it was— the public mind 
having satisfaction and relief in the 
belief of its future gradual extinction. 
The Republican platform on which he 
was first elected President expressly 
declared for the maintenance "invio- 
late" of the right of each State to or- 
der and control its own domestic in- 
stitutions — including slavery, of 
course — according to its own judg- 
ment exclusively. It is ofttimes for- 
gotten that even the so-called Eman- 
cipation Proclamation, issued after 
nearly eighteen months of war.offered 
freedom only to the bondsmen of 
States and slaveholders in rebellion; 
it even enforced the odious Fugitive 
Slave Law against those who escaped 
from loyal owners, and recommended 
compensation for that class who lost 
their human chattels. 

It will be remembered that the 
early popular and political responses 
to this mild measure of emancipation 
were so disappointing that Mr. Lin- 
coln "doubted whether, indeed, God 
was on his side." Benjamin R. Curtis, 
the great jurist, who had so powerful- 
ly dissented from Taney's decision in 
the first Scot case, published a pam- 
phlet to show that Mr. Lincoln had no 
constitutional right to issue his edict 
of qualified freedom. 

I recall these indisputable historic 
facts not to criticise some or defend 
others, but because it is only by keep- 
ing them in mind that one can rightly 
view men and events of fifty years ago 



(20) 

not only in their relations to the sub- 
ject under discussion, but to all the 
tremendous questions whose settle- 
ment convulsed the land with civil 
war and happily brought our country- 
men to the self-consciousness of a 
united nation. 



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